Stories

A PRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEE DOESN'T NEED TO BE IN THE OFFICE

London, United Kingdom
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Business
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May 14 @ 7:42pm

Chris is co-founder of one of the top independent gaming companies in Southeast Asia – a 13-year-old business that is totally virtual. ‘We don’t have an office anywhere. We employ 35 people spread across seven different countries, in 14 different cities. And they all work from home.’
'I called this guy I used to work with and said,' ''Hey, let’s start a company.''
He said, ‘Great, let’s start a company. Move to Singapore.’
I replied, ‘No, you move to Seattle.’
Neither one of us wanted to move. We decided to just do business from where we were, in Singapore and Seattle. But we needed an artist. The best artist we knew was in Kuala Lumpur. So we said to each other, ‘He can move to Singapore.’
But the artist said, ‘No, I don’t want to move. I want stay where I am.’
So, we started with the three of us in three different countries; Malaysia, Singapore and US.
* I spoke with Chris in Thailand where he had brought six member of his staff to train Muay Thai. He explains how he's been successful in keeping the best staff and why he'll never have an office.
'The reward mechanism is actually really perverse. It rewards the person who’s lazy and does a crap job and punishes the person who does a good job by giving them more work,'
This interview has never been published and it's available in the UK and rest of the world.